HST, RIP
I think I read Hunter S. Thompson in the National Observer, although I
may just have read a piece originally published there in a collection. I know I used
to read the National Observer for the crossword puzzle, when I was in junior
college.
I know Carey MacWilliams commissioned an article Thompson wrote
on the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang when he was at The Nation. Publishers
followed with a book contract.
Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang nudged Thompson over the line from journalist to
novelist.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made Thompson famous, but
Hell's Angels made him an author. And "Strange and Terrible Saga"
hints at what kind of author he will be. (As does Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
a play on the existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.)
Some would call
Hell's Angels a nonfiction book, or a memoir, but I call it a novel. I call what
he wrote diatribes.
I'm a diatribe writer myself.
The first writer
I remember getting enthusiastic about was Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers,
when I was stationed at James Connally AFB in Waco, Texas, in 1957.
Next
came Thompson, with the books that led up to Generation of Swine.
Next comes me, with BUSHED. Short for "Man, I'm bushed."
We are
all a Bushed Generation.
But let's not get ahead of our story.
Thompson
took his life yesterday. I am still unknown, except to my handful of steadfast readers,
the Buzzard Cult. But I spring to the easel of a morning. I am writing up a storm.
I might die, but I won't kill myself.
If you want to know what Thompson would
have written like if he got off drugs and alcohol, I am it.
Getting off drugs
and alcohol is the difference between me and him.
Plus our publishing histories,
of course.
We were born in the same year, 1939.
We were both enlisted
men in the Air Force.
He trained to work on DEW Line radar equipment. At
the end of tech school, he refused to accept his Secret clearance, on the grounds
he considered himself a security risk. To punish him, instead of sending him to Thule,
Greenland, the Air Force sent him to Eglin AFB, in Fort Walton Beach, and made him
a sportswriter for the base newsletter.
In his off-duty hours (or, knowing
Thompson, on duty, when no one was watching), he wrote wrestling promotion for the
Playground Daily News, a member of the Freedom newspaper chain. Wrote about
pro wrestlers like Billy Boy and Bad Boy Hines.
This is where Thompson perfected
his hyperbolic style and saw that Cassius Clay got his "I'm the greatest"
schtick from Gorgeous George, the flaming queen. Épatez les bourgeoises. It's
probably also where he got calling himself a Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, although
he might have gotten that from the Duke and the Dauphin in Mark Twain's Huckleberry
Finn.
A lot of Thompson's influences are literary.
One of my
favorite episodes of Thompson reporting is when he was in Palm Beach to cover the
Pulitzer divorce trial for Rolling Stone. He called his story, "A Dog
Took My Place," because Roxanne is alleged to have been overly fond of a German
Shepherd, or Peter was a myoscopic zoophiliac, and liked to watch, I don't remember
which.
Thompson was taken by surprise when Ernest Hemingway committed suicide,
in 1961. For many male writers our age that event was shocking.
Now that
I am 65, I'm not shocked by the manner of Thompson's death. Too many downers, for
too many years.
But I'm saddened by it. I have lost a friend, a man who could
say, at Nixon's funeral, when people were saying, "Maybe he wasn't so bad,"
"They should have driven a stake through his heart."
Also, not
many people know it, but I'm the wino he gave his Press credentials to on the Muskie
campaign train.
I pasted my picture over his.